Users of pen-enabled devices that interface with touchscreens or digitizers have become accustomed to high fidelity, low latency ink rendering that leverages a GPU-accelerated solid-color “pen” style ink effect. However, these pen-style effects only provide a solid color, and do not accurately represent writing or drawing with other writing instruments such as pencils and the like. The next step is to provide customers with a “pencil” style ink effect, but this requires a new and unique rendering technology in order to provide a natural and realistic look and feel, whilst preserving the low latency and high performance of the existing solid-color ink effect. Accordingly, improvements can be made in the field of pen or finger entry via touchscreen or digitizer devices.